sábado, 3 de junho de 2017

The idea of this dinner workshop is to understand ways of approaching food, how to stimulate the opening of locked taste buds, until one can notice all the different subtleties of what we usually refer to a single flavor. This is how a gourmand finds all that poetry in food, pointing out tones we cannot (yet!) fully relate to.

Altogether there will be one appetizer and 5 courses, coffee and tea, water, water with herbs, water with chilli, and 1 glass of wine included (and it's all also part of the learning!).

I'VE TRANSLATED SOME CONTENT TO ENGLISH, SEE BELLOW!!

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:

- The experience will be in German

- Price is 40, Euros, including all food and 1 Glass of Wine (extra is bought separately)

- It's not enough to confirm your presence here, you need to send an email to hallo@raumschwalbe.de! Then we'll send you further instructions Hope to hear from you soon! Awakening The taste Buds: An Experimental Dinner-Workshop

If how to become Gourmet is the question, then we must open our minds and hearts to be able to open our taste buds.

Starting with the basic flavors, we’ll gradually expand our palate to other sensations and experiences which are not very obviousl yet very rich.

Sweet, salty, bitter, umami, sour - That's a good start! This is the food introduction that should actually happen naturally during childhood, but that can be easily acquiered in adulthood.

WE START WITH UMAMI

The dishes where umami predominates, it’s our most important comfort food – it’s the taste of mother's milk. In fact, it’s not exactly a flavor, but rather the synergistic of some basic flavors, better known through glutamate. Ingredients like tomato, parmesan and mushrooms offer us this direct experience when we taste it calmly: the final taste in the mouth, is that of umami. Watch out for industrialized food: they seduce us with monosodium glutamate, the flavor enhancer which actually eliminates our taste sensitivity, smudges our taste buds, turning us into the opposite of being a gourmand and become addicted to industrialized spices.

THE CHALLENGES OF SOUR AND BITTER

The other flavors are easier to determin and to directly spot: sugar for the sweet, salt for the salty, coffee for the bitter, vinegar for the sour.

Sugar is very easy to be accepted by most people, We even have a worldwide problem with the sugar addiction.

Salt is also easy to accept, so we must pay attention to the amount of industrialized food we consume, as we easily ngest too much salt. We can help enhance the taste of foods with herbs and spices.

Sour is usually a bit more complicated in the food introduction, nevertheless not as complicated as bitter, which is a fundamental taste for good gastronomic experiences. Part of our rejection of the bitter tast comes from the fact that most non-edible plants are bitter, so we react on alertness. These are the flavors that generate the most resistance, but also the ones that can expand our experiences!

A person who doesn’t accept the bitter, cannot be considered gourmand. The smoked, the metallic taste, the tannins, many full and fantastic gastronomic experiences depend on this flavor in full action.

EXPERIMENTAL DINNER

Start: Tomato and parmesan cheese to test the umami (we do a guided tasting)

1st course: Mushroom Soup. Quite the comfort food, easy to accept. Symbolizes the umami, the papillae without major challenges. (We’ll exchange a bit more about umami and comfort food).

2nd: A variation of crispy leaves, nuts and fruits, to stimulate the sour flavor. (We’ll speak about textures, about biting crunchy things, and contrasts, such as the bittersweet).

3rd: The main course: salty! A mushrooms mix with macadamia and cashew nuts, spicy Risotto and parmesan cheese.